Facilitation & Mediation

Meeting Moderator

Attempting to facilitate an important meeting can present a number of challenges, including the following.

Maintaining objectivity is not easy when you have strong personal feelings or viewpoints about the meeting’s focus — a meeting facilitator must remain impartial so as not to force his or her perspective or opinions on the meeting attendees.

If you are one of the parties in a dispute, any attempt on your part to facilitate the discussion is likely to be viewed by the other party (or parties) as biased.

Your duties as facilitator often limit your opportunities to fully participate in the active dialog.

For conferences and large corporate meetings, you need someone who can MC the event — keeping the event on track and moving along while keeping the participants interested and engaged.

These are the best reasons for engaging the services of a trained facilitator. A professional facilitator relieves you of the responsibility for meeting logistics and flow so you can participate fully. Such a facilitator has no personal stock in the outcome of the meeting and can, therefore, remain objective throughout. A professional facilitator is also trained in conflict management — a necessary skill in meetings where the topic is hot and emotions are high. A corporate event requires personality and presence to keep participant energy high and focused.

Yvonne Ryan is such a facilitator. She has thousands of hours experience in meeting facilitation and conflict mediation. She can simplify your life and increase your group’s chances for reaching a successful meeting outcome. In addition to being discrete and considerate, Yvonne will also keep your meeting on track and maintain order with a deft hand. Yvonne’s sense of humor and stage presence can make your event memorable.

Audio/Video Conference Moderator

The new telecommunication technologies provide us with fantastic potential for better worldwide communication. However, moderating an audio or video conference presents additional and unique challenges that many leaders have not yet learned to address appropriately. The opportunities provided by the Internet have only expanded the challenges for the uninitiated. What do you do when one party wants to dominate the conversation? How do you keep track of who is speaking? How do you record the session for later reference or review? How do you arrange the necessary logistics? What should the “ground rules” be for such communication? Let Yvonne Ryan help you with these issues and more.

Conflict Mediator

Wherever there are people, there is difference of opinion. Differences of opinion create opportunities for conflict to arise. Although conflict is inevitable, it needn’t be painful or anxiety-arousing. You and your colleagues can probably manage most day-to-day conflicts among yourselves. However, when tempers flare and/or objectivity is lost because all parties are too close to the situation, it’s usually time to call in a third-party mediator to assist conflicting parties in reaching a satisfactory resolution to their dispute. Leader’s Edge CA can provide a trained mediator to help resolve these more serious matters.

Learning Facilitator – Live

Your organization may already have learning facilitators (trainers) on staff, but are they well-versed in working with techies? Perhaps you’ve down-sized your Training Department (or never had one). Whatever the case, Yvonne Ryan, the Techie Leadership Coach, is a resource you can call upon to work with your technical professionals in any learning situation.

Yvonne employs experiential training techniques and methods that take into account the varied learning styles of participants. Yvonne’s humor and engaging manner help make learning dry material more palatable and fun (and, as we all know, people learn better and retain more when they are fully engaged and having a good time). As a certified instructor of trainers, Yvonne can also assist your learning facilitation staff in understanding the techie mind and how to get best results with techie participants.

If your organization is in need of a dynamic learning facilitator for teleseminars or live classroom learning experiences, especially where technical professionals are involved, Yvonne T. Ryan is a resource you’ll want to tap.

Team Development Facilitator

Building and developing a high-performance technical team is a process. Teams rarely (if ever) gel immediately. It takes time and know-how to help a team become a synergistic entity capable of accomplishing spectacular outcomes.

Although we at Leader’s Edge CA can, with adequate time, educate and coach your team leaders to better facilitate this evolution, there are times when refocusing a team requires immediate attention and an experienced hand. A team development facilitator can help jump-start the team development process while your leaders come up to speed. If you are in need of a team coach or an experienced short-term team development facilitator to get a new or stalled team focused and on track…